Early Literacy Game: What's In The Box?

Here’s another really fun one for you and the kiddos to play on a rainy day, and it’s a great way to build your child’s vocabulary! All you’ll need is a box and some objects from around the house.

What’s In The Box?

Ability level: all ages

Directions: Find a mystery item from around the house. Take something like an apple from the fridge or a shoe from the closet, for example. Place the item in the box without your child seeing. Kick off the guessing game by providing three hints about the mystery object. For example, if it’s an apple, say: “It’s red, it grows on a tree, and we pick them in the fall.”

After the three hints, it’s your child’s turn to guess the object. If they need some help, toss out another hint.

Once they guess the object it’s their turn to find a mystery object for you to guess. This game works great with more than one child, too! Whoever is the first one to guess the object gets to pick the next one for the box.

You can see how easy it is to adjust the difficulty to this game by picking a more obscure mystery object or offering less obvious hints. As your child provides hints and guesses objects, they’ll be working to build and improve their vocabulary.

Be sure to follow along to catch the next game. In the meantime, have fun! If you would like more information about other fun early literacy games, check out sightwords.com.